Assessing the Anthropogenic Impact on West Indian Coral Reefs

Halftime Seminar

Hadrien Gourlé

September 27, 2018

Coral reefs are one of the most diverse ecosystem on the planet.

They face great challenges and their population is rapidely declining.

Can research help?

Where?

What?

  • Monitor the health of coral reefs using bacterial communities
  • Characterize the relationship between corals and their microbial environment

Why?

  • Bacterial communities relatively understudied
  • We do not know what are their role in the ecosystem
  • Beneficial Microorganisms for corals (BMCs)

Litterature Review

The 16S rRNA

The workflow

13 metabarcoding studies

13 metabarcoding studies

But…

what do they do?

Whole metagenome Sequencing

WMS - The workflow

Which one works best?

No independant, comprehensive and extensible benchmarks of taxonomic classifiers exists yet

Which one works best?

doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/bty390

Applying WMS to coral reef communities

Surrounding the reef

Ultra-deep sequencing of sediment and water samples in close proximity of coral reefs

Surrounding the reef

  • 6 sampling sites
  • water and sediment samples
  • NovaSeq sequencing (~ 300G / sample)

300G?

A dive in the coral reef microbiome

A dive in the coral reef microbiome

  • 10 sampling sites
  • mucus samples
  • DNA and RNA sequencing

Thank you!

Thank you!

Image rights and attributions

  • “16s RNA”: Public domain
  • “Possible roles between corals and symbionts”: CC BY. Copyright 2017 Peixoto, Rosado, Leite, Rosado and Bourne (doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2017.00341)
  • All other images: CC BY. Copyright 2018 Hadrien GourlĂ©